While most of the conservative-driven measures slated to appear on Colorado’s November ballot are designed to give tax money to billionaires, and a handful are designed to bully queer kids, two of them have a different purpose: to try and force structural changes to Colorado’s democracy which the initiatives’ backers seem to believe will benefit their interests. One seeks to mandate that ballot language be written to an “8th grade reading level,” and the other seeks to add voter identification requirements to Colorado’s vote-by-mail system. Both of the would-be alterations are sponsored by Advance Colorado.
As a reminder, Advance Colorado is a deep-pocketed conservative organization situated at the center of a large network of nonprofits, campaign committees, and other funding vehicles which allow its largely anonymous donors to exert tremendous influence on Colorado politics without the risk of public blowback. Phil Anschutz, the state’s richest man, is a known contributor to organizations within the network. Understanding that Coloradans are no longer in the business of electing Republican candidates, Advance Colorado puts its time and money into swaying Colorado’s ballot initiative process in its favor, while using Anschutz-funded think tanks and Anschutz-owned media properties to validate and promote its ideas – which, incidentally, tend to benefit Anschutz and others of his net worth (~$20 billion).
With many of the group’s 2026 ballot measures, the benefits to Anschutz and his ilk are obvious. The two in question today, though, seem geared for a longer game; not immediately delivering financial relief for the wealthy, not just winning this election, but shaping the next one, and the ones after that, forever.
Amendment 85 – Plain Language Ballot Questions
Advance’s Amendment 85 seeks to add a requirement to the Colorado constitution that all future ballot initiatives must be drafted in “plain language at no more than an 8th grade level” – which, admittedly, doesn’t sound ridiculous if you don’t think about it for longer than a second or two. Unfortunately, by the time the third second ticks around, the problems have piled up. As if legalese was complicated for the sake of complexity and not for the sake of precision. As if voters are knuckle-dragging plebeians who need to be spoon-fed. As if “an 8th grade reading level” were an actual metric of any sort (they presumably mean Flesch-Kincaid, but do not specify, meaning the actual standard would not, in fact, be in the law).
Another problem? We have already done this. In 2022, Colorado voters overwhelmingly approved Amendment GG, which forced greater transparency into ballot measures, requiring initiatives to spell out the impact they would have on people’s taxes if passed. If you’re a conservative organization like Advance Colorado which needs to rail against bog-standard laws and ballot initiatives by claiming they will make taxes skyrocket, the inclusion of Amendment GG into the constitution was a significant inconvenience.
But that’s not all: earlier this year, the legislature passed a bill which would accomplish something substantially similar to what Advance Colorado claims to be seeking with Amendment 85. HB26-1320 mandates accessible language for the ballot, such as avoiding using legal, technical, or specialized terminology when possible, avoiding overly complex phrasing, and more.
So what is the group really after? As usual, when Advance Colorado proposes something which sounds even moderately reasonable – or which, in this case, is transparently duplicative – it doesn’t take long to find the angle.
Exactly like with the Advance-backed Right to Hunt & Fish initiative I wrote about last week, Amendment 85 is an attempt to put language in the constitution to restrict and control how future laws and amendments can be written. In that case, the angle is to restrict future efforts to combat climate change. In this case, the angle is almost certainly to complicate citizens’ ability to tinker with taxes at the ballot box.
Under Colorado’s one-of-a-kind Taxpayer Bill of Rights, or TABOR, tax increases require voter approval at the ballot. Between Amendment GG’s existing fiscal transparency requirements and the would-be reading-level requirements of Amendment 85, I think Advance Colorado is attempting to make it prohibitively difficult to meet both mandates. Their theory, I imagine, is that explaining a formula linking population growth, inflation, and state revenue would be either impossible or very tricky at an 8th grade reading level.
Verdict: Whatever the specifics of Advance Colorado’s theory of the case when it comes to Amendment 85, I cannot in good conscience recommend that anyone vote for a billionaire-supported ballot initiative designed to weaken our ability to pass billionaire-unsupported ballot initiatives. Vote no.
Amendment 84 – Mail Ballot Voter ID
The other structural advantage Advance Colorado is trying to seize for conservatives on November’s ballot comes in the form of Amendment 84, which would introduce voter ID requirements for voters using Colorado’s vote-by-mail system. Essentially, it seeks to create new problems in response to nonexistent problems.
Colorado law requires an individual provide identification when registering to vote, but does not actually require identification in order to vote. If a Coloradan votes in-person at a polling place, they will be asked for an ID, but will still be allowed to vote, after signing an affidavit, if they cannot provide an ID. So far, the only real consequence of this system has been that Colorado appears at or near the top of many rankings of states by election security. In 2017, we became the first state to conduct voluntary risk-limiting election audits, and our ballot signature verification system – which is a voter identification system – is actually remarkable.
Now, despite the extraordinarily smooth functioning of our best-in-the-nation system, Advance Colorado wants to add voter ID requirements. If Amendment 84 were to pass, ballots would be uncounted if the voter did not write their driver’s license number, the last four digits of their Social Security number, or some other form of government identification on the outside of the ballot envelope. In addition to being a privacy nightmare, the added requirement would bring all the well-known consequences of voter ID laws with it.
Like with the Advance-backed corporate tax cap ballot initiative I wrote about a few weeks ago, this experiment has been run before. We all know what the effects will be. All that’s left to wonder is which one of those deleterious effects is most appealing to Advance Colorado executive director Michael Fields and his donors. Could it be the disparate impact on voter turnout among low-income and minority communities? Because that certainly seems to happen just about everywhere similar measures are introduced. Who’s to say? The appeal certainly can’t be their impact on the rate of election fraud, because they don’t have any.
In reality, with or without voter ID laws – which seem to only have negative effects – the occurrence of voter fraud is vanishingly small. According to the Brennan Center, the incident rate is “between 0.0003% and 0.0025%.”
Verdict: If we are being honest, there is no real mystery here. We’re all grown-ups. We understand why Advance Colorado is pushing Amendment 84. Even if we didn’t have reams of evidence about the well-documented impacts of voter ID laws, I would still suggest a no vote on the simple grounds that it’s probably unwise to let a billionaire-backed dark money organization, which exists entirely because Republicans can no longer win elections in this state, change the rules of elections in this state. Vote no.
